Fudge and PB cookie sandwiches

This dessert was really a combination of two previous desserts. We love our recipe for chocolate fudge cookies, and we also really like mixing peanut butter with chocolate. So this recipe practically wrote itself!

The main question was how to do the peanut butter filling. Last time, we mixed peanut butter with parve creamer and whipped it up into a peanut butter foam. I was afraid that would not hold up for this application, and so I instead went to work making a peanut butter pudding with some fish gelatin I bought a while ago.

The fish gelatin instructions only tell you to dissolve a whole packet in 1/2 cup of milk or water for 20 minutes, then to heat the whole thing to 50-60 degrees C. I added two packets to 1 cup of soymilk with peanut butter mixed in and waited. 20 minutes later, it was a hard lumpy mess. I heated it and added more soy milk, which resulted in a nice smooth liquid.

Getting past this smooth liquid was the hard part. As a liquid, it was too runny. After chilling in the freezer, though, it got too hard and rubbery. Depending on the texture, the taste varied from smooth and creamy to chewy-pudding. But it always tasted like peanut butter, which was the main point.

It was hard to work with my peanut-pudding, but the filling was ok in the end. I think next time I'd use the peanut butter whipped cream from last time.

Oh, another weird thing was that the peanut filling seemed to cause the cookies to lose their stiffness and instead become soft mushballs. Oh well, it's fudge anyway, right?

chocolate mud pie with peanut butter cloud

Rachel and I are very proud of this dessert we made for Shabbat, and not just because it tasted great. People cook great tasting things all the time. But how often do they do so while improvising with leftovers? Or innovating new tastes, all while keeping things well within the limitations of a tight, underemployed budget?

This is what it's all about, dear SF2 readers.

Ok, now that I've got the drama out of my system, here's how it went down. Rachel crushed up some chocolate cookies we had left over from the previous Shabbat and mixed them with margarine to form a cookie crust. (See previous post.) She let that harden in the freezer, then prepared a chocolate pudding mix with soy milk for the filling.

Since we're really into the whole chocolate-peanut butter desserts, I tried to think of a way to incorporate peanut butter without relying on margarine. I settled on making a peanut butter whipped cream by first mixing a few large spoonfuls of peanut butter with parve whipped cream and a little soymilk to make a smooth and less viscous peanut butter base. Then I whipped the rest of the parve cream and folded in the peanut butter.

That parve creamer must have lots of emulsifiers in it, which worked out great for us and held the peanut foam together. A bunch of hours in the fridge helped it set nicely; not quite whipped cream texture, but definitely light, almost marshmallow like, and with the unmistakable kiss of peanut butter.

Gourmet? Definitely not. Fantawesomely delicious? Definitely yes.

Grilled Nutella PB +++

Grilled nutella and peanut butter, and peanut butter and marshmallows. Enough said.